Writing Is Hard, Who Knew!

I think probably everybody knew.

Hi! Wow, this is daunting. I launched this newsletter a couple of weeks ago and then ran quickly through a gamut of feelings: satisfaction that I’d actually finally managed to accomplish something I’d been meaning to accomplish for months, gratitude for every “you have a new subscriber!” email that came in, and then finally the juddering, dread-laced realization of “waaaaait, now I actually have to do this,” which basically accompanies every single thing I enthusiastically sign myself up for and then immediately panic about having committed to.

In my family, we have a sort of shorthand for this feeling. To telegraph the very specific mix of uneasiness and excitement that accompanies any daunting new undertaking, you merely have to say “I don’t know, I’m just feeling very ‘Christ, what ’ave I done?’”

This comes from the 1977 documentary “21 Up,” the third installment of Michael Apted’s brilliant “Up” documentary series, which checks in with a group of people every seven years, beginning in 1964 when they’re seven years old. I literally cannot even believe I found this extremely esoteric clip on YouTube, but here it is so you can experience it for yourself:

(It also cracks me up that Lynn, the woman above, is referring to MARRIAGE as the thing she is questioning having committed to. Although tbh, show me a person who has not at some point in their marriage — perhaps upon viewing the way their partner has left a week’s worth of discarded clothes atop the laundry hamper but not actually in it? I don’t know, just a highly specific example that I’m obviously not at all guilty of — and thought “Christ, what ’ave I done?”)

Anyway, poor Lynn died in 2013, but her amazing words live on. She is, as they say, a vibe.

At any given time, I am “Christ, what ’ave I done?”-ing several things in my life, although the biggest, most pressing one right now is my decision to write a novel. Writing a novel is something I’ve been wanting to do for many, many years, but I have only recently started to buckle down properly and actually try to make it happen, instead of just mooning about moodily saying things like “well, if only I had the time.” At the end of last year, following a very inspiring eight-week writing workshop in which I was motivated mainly by the realization that I would have to share something with the group and therefore finally wrote almost two chapters, I decided to call my own bluff and actually give myself the time. For the first three months of 2023, I stepped back from my regular freelance writing so I could focus only on my novel.

This has gone …. I don’t want to say badly, because it’s been truly incredible to have the space to commit to it and figure out what I want to write about and how I want to make the reader feel so that they take to Goodreads afterwards and say things like “ignored my children for 24 hours because I couldn’t put this down” (my own personal highest compliment, sorry kids.) But it has gone slowly. Like, embarrassingly slowly. I have finally come to terms with the fact that I am just a slow writer, the way other people are, I don’t know, redheads or vegans or something.

Being a slow writer is just a thing about me, the way being a person who has to return their shopping cart every single time or something bad will happen is a thing about me, or being a person who cannot grow her fingernails is a thing about me. I have read Anne Lamott’s Shitty First Drafts again and again over the last few months, trying to hew to the conventional writing advice of just getting the words out, however awful, and making them better later, but it just isn’t a process that comes naturally to me. I cannot write quickly and badly and make it better later. I can only write slowly and badly and then spend many, many hours making it painstakingly better, sentence by sentence, in ever-increasing spirals, until I can eventually feel satisfied and move on.

This is obviously a super inefficient way to write anything!

To be fair, since the beginning of the year, I have basically thrown out my old plot and started a new one, which I like much better. I have spent a very fruitful week in England for research. I have applied to three summer writing workshops, not heard back from two yet, and found out I’m on the waitlist for one (very “always the bridesmaid, never the bride,” if I’m honest, but I guess I’ll take the win?) Plus, I’ve finally spent a decent chunk of time revising a short story I submitted to a literary journal in 2020 after their not-quite-a-rejection-rejection that included some useful feedback and the encouraging line “please feel free to resubmit the story; we'd gladly read a revision.” Pretty sure they were not banking on it taking me three years to do so, but look, I am a slow writer! With fingernails that also grow slowly!

So it’s not like I’ve done nothing, particularly since I’ve still been managing my kids / dog / house / various volunteer commitments / the consequences of signing up to be “Girl Scout Cookie Manager” because the title made me laugh (verdict: gratifyingly hilarious to be able to introduce yourself as the Cookie Manager, possibly not worth the many three-hour meetings about Thin Mint supply and demand.) But still—

EXCUSE ME, BREAKING NEWS, WHOA. In the time between me obsessively re-reading that paragraph and moving, like, a comma before reading it again and moving the comma back to where it had originally been, I checked my email and saw an email from the writing workshop — the one I had literally just been talking about — moving me off the waitlist and offering me a place!

OMG! I AM FINALLY THE BRIDE!

Seriously, that was a plot twist I didn’t expect. What the heck! How exciting. Real-time developments! Did not see that coming.

You know what’s next though, right? Of course you do. A whole bunch of panicked second-guessing about it! Meet me back here next week so I can say “Christ, what ‘ave I done?”